


among twenty snowy mountains the only moving thing

by indigostohelit



Category: Knives Out (2019)
Genre: Autumn, Cunnilingus, Dom/sub Undertones, Emotionally Repressed, F/M, Hot Chocolate, Manipulation, Massachusetts, Missing Scene, Power Dynamics, Sharing Clothes, Spoilers, Sweaters, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:07:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21676504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: As it turns out, Ransom is kind of enjoying being the good guy.
Relationships: Marta Cabrera/Ransom Drysdale
Comments: 52
Kudos: 1101





	among twenty snowy mountains the only moving thing

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Единственное, что двигалось в краю двенадцати заснеженных вершин](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23532865) by [AppleOfYourEye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AppleOfYourEye/pseuds/AppleOfYourEye)



> Contains massive spoilers for every part of the movie. Warnings below also contain vague spoilers.
> 
> Title from Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". Warnings for canon-typical misogynist and ableist language, racism, and anti-immigrant prejudice; setting-typical Massholery; animal death; a violent daydream; and very very mild dubcon, of the "X would probably not have wanted the sex if X had known the ending of the movie" variety.

As it turns out, Ransom is kind of enjoying being the good guy.

Not that he’d have ever expected it, from the novels. Oh, sure, everyone and their little brother dresses up as some Thrombey hero for Halloween, dog-ear caps and mustaches and the fucking magnifying glasses, if he could reach into a book and throttle a detective through the page—but Ransom’s never been among them. He’s never wanted to be. Detectives and murderers and the locked room and the four fingerprints and the train times table and who shot the butler and who kicked the dog, none of that stuff is as interesting as everyone pretends it is. Jerking off over a crossword puzzle, in the end. Ransom’s always had better things to jerk off to.

What he’s always liked are the ordinary guys. You always catch a couple of them, stuffed in as red herrings and patsies, standing next to the detective to show how smart he is; you can tell who they are, because they’re the only people in the book who talk like fucking human beings. They don’t want justice, or revenge. They want human shit, like to be left alone, or a nice vacation, or ten million dollars. And Ransom, well, Ransom’s an ordinary guy, too. He likes to see that kind of thing.

But his mind keeps drifting back to that moment in the drive, in front of the house. Marta’s scared little face. The way she’d looked at him, as she’d scrambled from her car to his passenger seat. Frightened, mostly, and kind of desperate, obviously. But kind of grateful, too.

So Ransom’s a white knight now. It just warms your fucking heart.

He watches her out of the corner of his eye, as he drives. She doesn’t talk much, which is fine. What happened after he left? Oh, Dad lost his shit? What a surprise. Mom lost hers? Could’ve guessed that one, too, if you knew her. Ransom knows her pretty fucking well.

He wonders if Marta does, really. He wonders if Marta knows any of them. Even Harlan. It’s not like you have to know a guy to stick him with a hundred milligrams of morphine.

“Are you doing all right?” he says, as the car curves around the bend and onto the highway into town. It’s a stupid question: her hands are shaking, and her eyes keep darting up and down and out the window like she’s on coke.

She doesn’t bother with a stupid answer, though, just rests her forehead against the window. After a while, as they’re passing that ranch Meg used to go to, she says, “Horses,” under her breath. Ransom nearly swerves the car into the wrong lane.

He kind of enjoys buying her meal, too. Very chivalrous. Very fifties. Oh, look at me, the big provider, putting food on your table and not Venmoing you for it. Real alpha male hours in MetroWest tonight. When he slides the plate away from her, that strange feeling flares up again, hot in his stomach: possessiveness, or—how could he be possessive? What is there to be possessive of? She’s no one. She’s not a heroine, she’s certainly not a goddamn heiress. She’s just a doe-eyed nurse from fuck knows where that he’s turned into a murderer. She’s just the kind of girl that lives to the end of a horror movie, and he’s dipped her hands in blood up to the elbows.

Oh. Huh.

Okay, then.

He says, “Tell me everything.”

She begins—the study, his grandfather, that _fucking_ Go board. He nods, and watches the sky cool outside. The trees are draining of color, emerald red brown to grey and grey and grey. Harlan joking with her—God, the old asshole always thought he was so funny. That's something Ransom won’t miss.

The way Marta’s hands move, when she talks, fascinates him: how they flutter up, like birds, and then drift down to clutch at the table. Administering the drugs—good, that’s the confession, that’ll get her for neglect if he hires the right firm. He’ll hire the right firm. The bones of her wrist. She’s going to look so ugly in orange. One hundred milligrams, she tells him, into Harlan’s body. The paleness of her palm.

The evening is coming in fast, now, like a runaway train. He hates these early sunsets; he’s always meant to move out to somewhere sunnier, southern, but he can never quite manage it. It grows on you, the autumn. The darkness out here. Her mouth; her lips; her tongue darts out to lick them, occasionally. God, she just has no idea what she’s done. She has no idea what _he’s_ done. She has no idea what’s going to happen to her.

He’s always made a point of not fucking the help—what is he, his father? Well, the help is certainly fucked now, ha ha. He sips his old-fashioned, rolls the ice around in his glass. And besides, even like this, red-eyed and knife-edged in front of him, she’s still kind of—passive. He doesn’t think she could’ve murdered Harlan on purpose even if the geriatric fuck had tried to put that knife between her ribs. Like Meg’s guinea pig he accidentally killed in college. Just sitting there, shivering in the palm of his hand.

He’ll let her see the toxicology report, once he gets it from Fran. That’s what he’ll do. He’ll let her know she killed his grandfather with her own hands, and then he’ll tell the police. He’ll let her live for a few hours free. Knowing what kind of person she really is.

“Only then,” she says, “I asked him if he wanted some morphine, and I looked at the morphine bottle, and I—“

Her voice breaks. Ransom looks up, sharply.

“You what?” he says.

She buries her head in her hands.

The picture of the future, abruptly, dissolves. Ransom thinks, all at once: _The labels_ — and, _Fran—Fran's toxicology report, it'll show—_ and, _The will, the will won’t be invalidated, the will’s still—_

—and then, as clearly as if it were a voice from an angel: _She_ does _know what she's done._ Or— _What she thinks she's done._ _She thinks she killed him. And if she thinks she killed him, then the whole day she spent with the detective—_

God! And he’d thought, her face as she’d scrambled into the passenger seat of his car, so desperate for his help, so _innocent—_

“Marta,” he says. “What did you do?”

“I tried to find the naloxone,” she says. “I tried. I swear to God, Ransom, I tried.”

Ransom thinks, _Hugh._

Then he says, instead, “Keep talking.”

The plan. The suicide. The escape. The cover-up. Ransom is listening from somewhere very far away. This diner is a warm yellow blink in the emptiness of the planet, and he’s somewhere drifting, out in the stars. Marta’s confessed her innocence. She’s confessed it to _him_. She hasn’t committed a murder.

She’s just desperate to get away with one.

And Ransom—

Ransom’s kind of enjoying being the good guy.

They walk out to his car in the cool of the November evening. Ransom feels strangely light, like he’s glowing. Sixty million dollars in her bank and the bitch couldn’t even pay for his cocktail. What a cheapskate. What if he has to go and ask her for a yearly allowance every April? What if he has to beg?

Marta stops in the parking lot. Her breath is white, curling into nothing. She’s looking up, straight up, so that Ransom can see the bared curve of her neck.

“There’s fewer stars here than out at the house,” she says. She sounds distant, too.

Ransom looks up. It’s true, he guesses, though he can’t say he spends a hell of a lot of time stargazing at Harlan’s place. Out there you can see the whole Milky Way trailing across the sky, like dirty water running down the drain of the Universe. Harlan tried to point all the constellations out to him once: Orion, Sirius, Gemini. Here the sky is speckled uncertainly, as if someone meant to finish it and forgot. The North Star stares at him without blinking.

He pulls his keys from his pocket and jingles them around his finger. Marta jumps, and tucks her chin back down. That startled, rabbitish look is back in her eye.

“Could we,” she says. “Do we have to drive back right away? Could we sit out here a while?”

Fuck, and it’s only freezing enough to make your dick drop off. But Ransom kind of shrugs, and drops his keys back into his pocket.

“Why not,” he says.

They sit on the curb, next to each other. She’s still shivering, but from more from cold than anything else, he thinks. Her hand splayed on the cement next to his.

“You did good,” he says, “out with the police. Covering everything up.”

She looks down. “Harlan told me what to say.”

“Yeah, but the footprints,” he says, “the videotape, that was quick thinking. Not a lot of people would have thought of that.” His father wouldn’t. Walt and and fucking Joni certainly wouldn’t. Meg would be in jail by now.

“You would have,” she says, soft.

Ransom looks sideways at her, hard. But she doesn’t seem to mean anything by it; she’s just staring out at the parking lot, her chin on her knees, her hands tucked into her armpits. It’s amazingly unsexy.

“Yeah,” he says, “maybe. Here.” He unwinds his scarf from his neck and extends it to her, a loose pile of cloth. She looks startled, shakes her head; he proffers it again. “Come on. You can’t get frostbite. You have to commit obstruction of justice tomorrow.”

“Keep your voice down!” Marta hisses.

He glances around: a waitress smoking by the dumpsters, a homeless guy in a pile of newspapers, a couple cars humming by on the road. “There’s nobody here,” he says, trying to pitch it kindly. “Just you and me.”

She hesitates, but she takes the scarf, and winds it around her neck until her whole shoulders and chin are covered in it. Burberry model she isn’t. He’d have loved to see her at one of his Yale parties like this. Someone would have thrown her out a window into the snow. Maybe him.

It’s stupid to say it, but he says it anyway: “Do you trust me?”

Marta looks at him a while, long enough that he’s starting to get uncomfortable. Then she says, “Yes.”

“Why?” he says.

She purses her lips, tucks her hands into the sleeves of her sweater. “I don’t know,” she says. “You seem—” Kind? Honest? “—rational, I guess. Back at the house—I’ve never seen them like that. Like animals. You just seemed—human.”

“I did hear humans are the only animals that commit murder,” he says.

“Don’t say that,” she says with a shudder. “You sound like Jacob.”

Now that hurts. “Ouch,” he says, lightly, to disguise it. And then, “Human, okay. I can live with that.” He shrugs his coat up to his ears, which are starting to go hard and painful with cold. “Bet you a dollar it’s not the worst thing you’ve ever said about me.”

She smiles, a little. “You might lose that bet.”

“Bet you sixty million,” he says.

She watches him, her head tilted. He never has heard her say anything bad about him, really bad, the kind of bad the rest of them like to come up with when they can’t sleep; but then again, he tries not to stay in the house much these days. He knows he’s only managed to hear half the shit his mom’s said about him. Marta could be telling her family anything, when she goes home to that little building in town. Marta could have anything going on in her head. Anything at all.

Both of them sitting next to murderers, and only one of them knows it. It’s like the Gift of the fucking Magi.

“Hey,” he says. “Let’s drink to it, once the investigation blows over. We’ll go up to his study and steal his Macallan.” He laughs. “Your Macallan. Or, I don’t know—“ What the fuck do they drink in British Honduras? “I’ll buy you rum. We’ll have a toast, just you and me.” And the house. And the police. And his grandfather’s blood, drying in the carpet.

“Toast to what?” she says.

“Oh,” says Ransom, “to being human. To being the only two humans in the world.”

He can see Marta’s throat move, in the dimness of the lamplight. Those clear, serious eyes. Her hair, loose and dark around her shoulders, like a shadow.

He always used to tell the guys he liked blondes.

Her lips are cool, at first, and then warmer. He leans into her, against her; her hand flutters, and then lands on the back of his neck just above his sweater, four points of ice-cube cold against his skin, an anchor. Her perfume smells like oranges, sharp and sweet, and her mouth tastes like beer.

She’s small, but she’s warm. Everywhere she’s touching him, his neck, his lips, her hand splayed over his heart, is warm. Ransom’s never cared much about kissing; but he likes kissing her. He likes touching her. Her heart’s hiccuping against his chest, under his thumb. He likes that perfume. He likes that he bought her those beers. He likes having her inside the circle of his arms, shivering a little. Not even trying to run away.

She turns her head, after a while, and leans back. He lets her go, and watches her duck her head, bury her chin in his scarf.

“Was this about sex?” she says, a little muffled.

Ransom blinks, caught off guard.

“Helping me,” she clarifies. “Was it about sex?”

He's at a loss. “Isn’t everything about sex?” he says, eventually. “Isn’t that what they say?”

“Not everything,” she says, and looks away.

He looks at her a while. In the summer, walking into this diner, you can hear the crickets singing, all hours of the day and night. Now the whole world is silent, aside from the cars and the wind.

“I mean—why did Meg hang up on me?” she says. It sounds like she's trying to explain something to him, though fuck knows what. “When I said that I would take care of her. Why wouldn’t she just take it and say thank you?”

“Well,” Ransom says, and stops.

She uncurls herself, slowly, and stands. “It’s cold,” she says, and reaches down to him. “Let’s go.”

He narrows his eyes at her. Her expression doesn’t change, blank and steady.

“Okay,” he says, and puts his hand in hers, and lets her pull him to his feet.

In the car, his engine rumbling underneath them like an animal, he says, “It isn't about sex. Why I’m helping you out.” He really wants her to know that, fuck knows why. It’s even true.

“I know it isn’t,” Marta says. She’s curled up in his passenger seat again, his scarf half-falling down her shoulders. One loose end is dangling over her breast.

He looks out at the road ahead, headlights pooling over lane markings and exit signs. The cold of the parking lot has sobered him up, maybe more than he would like. He feels awake, sharp, like Harlan’s knives.

He hit a deer out here, once. Wrecked his last car. It had died in front of him, liquid-eyed, silent, its jaw open and its red wet tongue pushing at its teeth. Walt and his father go hunting, sometimes, but Ransom’s never wanted to. The stupid fuck-me guns and the big ugly vests. Again: his dick works fine already.

But he’d crouched by that deer, unmoving, as its guts heaved through the gash he’d left in its side. It hadn’t been fun, exactly, no psycho bullshit like that. But it hadn’t been sad, either. It had just been something he was doing, and then, later, it had been something he’d done.

He thinks about missing the turn onto the highway. They could get lost in the woods, he and Marta. Drive in circles until the car ran out of gas. Turn the engine off and wait for the great detective Benoit Blanc to rescue them. Or he could keep driving, through Connecticut into New York and out towards Pennsylvania, Bonnie and Clydeing it into the West. He always kind of liked the way Bonnie put her lipstick on.

Here’s the turn. He makes it, and curves onto the highway, tree-lined and endless up to the vanishing point.

“Your place,” he says, “or mine?”

Without looking at him, she blinks, slow and thoughtful, her mouth an unhappy little curve in the middle of her face. “Yours,” she says. “My mom will wake up if we go to mine.”

They drive on, into the night.

Her mom. Jesus. If his aunt Donna finds out that Harlan Thrombey slit his throat for an illegal alien. _When_ she finds out, obviously. Obviously she’ll find out once Ransom gives Marta to the cops.

Ransom kind of wants to meet the mom, just to see her face. Then again, it’s not like it won’t be all over the news.

Marta’s never been to his house before. He knows; he would’ve remembered. He doesn’t like bringing people to his place, even girls. His parents have been there all of once. He invited Harlan, years ago. Harlan turned him down.

He has a king bed, there, Japanese linen and about twenty throw pillows. Maybe he'll put Marta on it. He'll turn her over onto her hands and get on top of her, behind her, his hand over her wrist, her hair hanging down, swaying with each thrust. But then again—he kind of wants to see her face, too. He wants to push her onto her knees in the foyer; he wants to thumb open her mouth. Those long, beautiful eyelashes, fluttering up at him. _Ransom_ , she might say, again. Then she wouldn’t be able to talk.

He shifts in the driver’s seat. Eyes on the road, Ransom. Beside him, Marta is curled into herself, silent. In the reflection of the passenger side window, her face is like a ghost’s.

The car pulls into his driveway, the leaves pale and scarlet in his car lights. Marta unclicks her seatbelt and lets the buckle slither up and over her, unmoving.

“You have to drive me back to Harlan’s house later,” she says, without inflection. “My car is still there.”

“Wow,” says Ransom. “You’re a romantic.”

“Are you?” she says, and opens the car door. He follows her up the drive, towards the house, whose front porch light blazes into life to greet her. Ransom can smell the rotting leaves, all around him, and the sharp coldness of the stars. A line from a high school poem, long ago, drifting up in the river of memory: _It was snowing, and it was going to snow. The blackbird—_

What did the blackbird do? He comes up behind Marta at the door, puts his hand on one side of her and curves his arm around the other to fit the key in the lock. The lightbulbs blink on inside, one by one: foyer, sitting room, kitchen, buzzing into silence.

She unties her shoes in the entryway, careful with the knots, a little line between her brows. He shrugs his camel coat onto the floor and pushes past her, around the marble island in the kitchen, and takes down two mugs from the top shelf: that Columbia one from his ex and the Tom Brady one with a chip in it. “Wine?” he says. “It’s only like fifteen bucks, but it’s open in the fridge.”

“Out of a coffee cup?” she says. She’s looking at the trail of shoeprints across the kitchen tile, wet and shining.

“You already think you’re better than me, huh?” says Ransom, and smiles at her when she glances at him. Look at him; he makes jokes. “Fine. Fill up the kettle, it’s on the counter. No, under the open cupboard door. Put it on the round thing, it’s already plugged in. Next to the sugar.”

She sets it on the round thing, where it clicks and begins to hum. He goes down on his knees by the pantry and pulls out the shelf of stuff: expired olive oil, beer, expired alfredo sauce, more beer, Saigon cinnamon, all those weird green mason jars Joni got him for Christmas in 2012. “Go sit on the couch,” he says, over his shoulder. “Mi casa es tu casa. Oh, wait.”

She doesn’t go sit on the couch, though. She circles back around the kitchen island, and climbs onto the tall white stool there. Ransom can see her polka-dot socks out of the corner of his eye, her toe curling around one of the rungs.

He rolls back squatting onto his heels, lifting a jar in each hand. “Swiss Miss or Williams-Sonoma?” he says. “They both have the little marshmallows.”

“Williams-Sonoma,” she says. “Is there milk?”

“Good choice,” he says, pushes up to his feet. “Almond fine?”

“Fine,” she says. “Ransom?” He looks up. “Thank you.”

The kettle’s boiling, and the milk is in the fridge. He pours about three-quarters of the marshmallows into the Columbia cup, and dumps the rest in Brady’s, and comes back to the island and slides the Brady mug over to her. She drinks. He watches her eyelids slide shut, her tongue come out to lick the chocolate from her lip.

“Good murder method,” he says, “hot chocolate. Nobody would notice, if you made it strong enough. You know cyanide tastes like almonds?”

Her knuckles go very white around her mug. He smiles at her, and pries it gently out of her hands, and takes a big gulp.

“Mmm,” he says. “Good.”

It fascinates him, watching her muscles relax, eyes to jaw to shoulders. She settles back down in her chair, and wraps her hands around the mug, her thumbs over his nails. He holds on for a moment before he lets it go.

“You remind me of your grandfather,” she says.

He jerks a few steps back. “God! Way to ruin the mood.” A horrible thought: “Wait. My mother wasn’t— _right_ , was she? About—”

“No!” she snaps. Her ears have gone very red. “Oh my god, _no!_ Why does everyone have to ask—”

“Jesus, I’m sorry,” he says, comes back to the island, back into her space. “Okay. Fine. I’m taking the compliment.” He drinks. “You know I wouldn’t kill you, right?”

“I know,” she says.

“The whole inheritance would go to your mom, or the state of Massachusetts,” he says. He’s not entirely sure why he needs to explain. “I’d just be fucking myself over.”

“I know,” she says again, looking at him steadily. “I know you wouldn’t kill me.”

He would, is the thing. He’d put his hands around her neck and squeeze until her face turned blue and she stopped kicking. Then he’d throw her body on the grounds, and hang around to watch it be eaten by the dogs. It’s just that he doesn’t particularly want to do that right now.

He puts his mug down and leans forward and fits his mouth to Marta’s again, gently. It’s better the second time. When she pulls back he chases her lips, going onto his toes, until he can feel the heat of the coffee cup against his breastbone.

The look on her face hasn’t changed. She says, softly, “You’re being very kind to me.”

Ransom feels, abruptly and without warning, like he’s punched his fist through a window. He reaches out and cups her face in his hand and kisses her again, again, until she’s breathless and he’s panting, and says, “Go to the couch.”

She doesn’t move. He snarls, “Go,” again, and he turns away.

The condoms are in his coat, by the door. He goes to one knee, shoves a couple into his back pocket, staring blankly at the undone laces of her shoes. Then he comes up, and circles slow and deliberate to the sitting room. Marta is on the couch, her sweater laid carefully beside her. She glances towards him; he sees her see him coming. When he steps onto the carpet, she reaches to her throat and undoes the button of her collar, and then the shirt buttons beneath, down and down and down.

Underneath is a black bra, freckled shoulders, the flat pale plane of her stomach. Ransom looks at it, silent. He wishes she had that look back in her eye, the frightened one, the desperate one. He wishes he was in the car with her, driving her away from something terrible. He wishes—

He goes to his knees on the carpet and undoes the button on her pants. She lifts herself up so he can slide them down, his fingers on her thighs, on her calves. Who shaves in November? Her, apparently. He kisses the inside of the curve of her knee, her thigh, more absently than anything else, testing with his mouth where his hands have been. Her panties, grey and worn lace. He slips his fingers inside and finds her wet already, warm and soft. Good, he thinks, and “Good,” he says aloud. Fuck the bed, and fuck the blowjob. He’ll fuck her here. He’ll do it face-to-face, after all.

He moves to stand up, and her hand lands on his shoulder, heavy through the sweater. She’s looking down at him, dark-eyed.

“Ransom,” she says, “could you—”

Her ears are red again. It takes Ransom a second to understand; then _no_ is on his tongue immediately, thick and sour. He doesn’t do that. He doesn’t like to; there’s no point. He’s done it, obviously, with the girlfriend from Columbia, with a couple of others who have begged and cajoled him; but they’ve never asked him to do it again. There’s no enthusiasm.

The pressure of the condoms in his back pocket. He’d seen her shoes by the door. He’d seen.

Marta’s hand is still on his shoulder. He looks up at her; then, experimentally, he lowers his eyelashes a little, and looks up at her through them.

She licks her lips. He shuts his eyes for a moment, and bends to mouth briefly through her panties at the outline of her cunt.

Even through the cloth—maybe because of the cloth—she’s sensitive, so sensitive. He kisses her, where her clit must be, below it, and she gasps, breathy. It’s like porn. His teeth, just light, at the place where her leg begins; she gasps again. “Okay,” he says. He feels, for the second time this night, as if he is miles away from his body, dust in the darkness. “Okay.” He tugs at her panties, and she helps him pull them down, his fingers on her legs again, the wide smooth expanse of skin there, he kisses it without thinking, his teeth, his tongue, up and up again.

“Marta,” he says, soft.

“Shh,” she says. She cups the back of his head, and guides him forward.

He licks into her, across her, clit down. Two fingers, spreading her open. Inside her there’s a spot—he finds it—her thighs convulse around him, she gasps, gasps. She couldn’t hide this if she tried. All day she’s managed to lie the police but she can’t lie to him. Very gently, his teeth on her clit, just the edge, just to offset the pressure of his tongue. Her nails, digging into his shoulder, just above the collar of the sweater. Ransom likes it, that little pinprick of pain.

He lets his eyes flutter open. Marta is looking down at him, pupils blown. What does she want? What does she want to do with him? To him? He doesn’t mind the view from here.

His dick is painfully hard. He fumbles in his pants; his right hand is still inside her, stroking, pressing, and every teenager in the world knows the left hand just isn’t the same but it’ll do for now, and he gets it on his dick—god, the relief—and bends once again to his task, steady and hard. Marta can see him touching himself, he can tell. Her fingers come up, into his hair, petting him, gentle. He likes it. He has to close his eyes again.

He can tell when she’s getting close, and so can she; her hand squeezes around the back of his neck, hard, and then her head falls back and she comes near-silently, in waves, around his fingers and his tongue. She lets go of him. He pushes himself back on the carpet and gets his right hand around himself, finally, hot and good and wet with her. He’s so close already.

“Wait,” she says. She’s recovering, looking down at him through half-lidded eyes. Her body is loose and her voice soft, satiated. “Come up here, let me. Ransom—”

He comes with a grunt, and sags back against the coffee table. When he opens his eyes again, fuck knows when, she has her shirt back on, its hem brushing against her naked thighs.

“You don’t want to go again?” he says.

She looks at him, surprised. “Could you?”

What, get hard? Of course he couldn’t. He stares at her blankly.

She shakes her head, and turns away. He watches her bend to pick up her panties. Her hair is a curtain over her face. “I think you should drive me to my car,” she says.

“Okay,” he says. “If you want.”

They’re on the highway, the road skimming away before them, when he says, “I can just drive you home.” He should just drive her home. He needs to deliver her a blind date with Fran anyway. And it wouldn’t be a bad thing—he lets himself imagine, for a moment—tomorrow, picking her up from the crowd of reporters, Walt or Dad threatening maybe, the two of them taking a side street towards the medical examiner’s office, away from all this. Playing the hero again. It’s kind of growing on him.

“No,” she says. “I just want my car back.”

He shrugs, unaccountably irritated. “Okay.”

The house is deserted when they return. Lights out; nobody here but us chickens. Ransom dawdles at the end of the drive to avoid the dogs, listening to the engine thrum. Marta’s unbuckling her seatbelt, her hand on the door handle.

“You have your keys?” he says.

She nods. “Thank you for the ride.”

“No problem,” he says. “My pleasure.”

She’s out of the car. The door shuts behind her. He watches as she circles his hood, the faint puffs of her breath barely visible in his headlights, and comes up to the driver’s side window. He cranks it down.

“Ransom,” she says, “thank you. Really. For everything.”

Something he can’t identify clenches, painfully, like a side stitch. He leans up, out of the window, and kisses her. Very soft. Very gentle. _You’re being very kind to me_ , she’d said. He lets her go.

“Let’s do it again sometime,” he says. “Seriously. I mean it.”

For the first time tonight, a smile, swift and bright in the darkness. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll see you soon.”

She will. He listens to her crunch away, and when he sees her headlights flare in the drive, he backs the car up, turns it around, and peels into the darkness.

He has errands to run. There’s a bottle of bad gin in his trunk, and a book of matches, and a dirty rag. The medical examiner’s office will have to be first. His mouth is still warm.


End file.
